Why the Mobile ‘Pocket Office’ Is Inevitable and Good for Business
For most employees, the business day revolves around reports that help them keep score in terms of how they are doing versus internal goals and external competitors. The problem is that most of those reports are out of date a few minutes after they get generated.
As part of an effort to give users of the Salesforce1 customer relationship management (CRM) cloud access to more relevant reports, Salesforce.com has rolled out Salesforce1 Mobile Reports & Dashboards, a set of mobile applications that enable users to gain access to the latest data stored in Salesforce1 on demand.
Todd Enders, senior director of analytics for Salesforce.com, says giving users the ability to drill down through data residing in Salesforce1 in real time means sales people can take more informed actions faster any time an event occurs around a particular customer. Rather than waiting for a new report to be generated, Salesforce1 Mobile Reports & Dashboards provides immediate access to the latest data via the Salesforce1 application programming interface (API).
Having direct access to that level of data, adds Enders, also serves to substantially reduce the dependency a sales representative needs to have on administrators in the home office to gather all the relevant customer data on their behalf. Ultimately, that means organizations can increase the overall percentage of the sales staff that actually spends its time in the field.
At the end of the day, sales productivity comes down to making sure that sales people spend more of their time selling versus generating reports. By reducing the administrative tax on sales people, Enders says that rather than wasting an inordinate amount of time figuring out what’s happening with a particular client, sales people can better reallocate that time to maximizing the amount of revenue and associated commissions that can be generated.
Whether sales people take advantage of mobile computing applications to achieve that goal will depend on how highly motivated the sales representative actually is. But when it comes to revenue, time and, again, compensation have been shown to be the ultimate best driver of behavior.
